I was just thinking, is this necessary if you want only iron? What about just mining the places where you'd only get iron? If you mine a spot where you'd get something other than iron with high enough skill, and you don't have that skill level- will you get iron instead, or will the attempt simply fail?

I considered this recently as well. I can't say whether colored ore comes from otherwise failed attempts (sub 65 mining), but I did feel that my level 60ish miner collected more usable training ore (non-colored) in a shorter period of time than my GM miner. May just have been that I didn't spend as much time dealing with all the various ores.

Locking your Mining skill at 64.9 will prevent you from digging up all but iron. You wont fail at attempting colored ore, it simply wont be available to dig at all. Most if not all spots contain some iron, so essentially all spots will yield only iron to you.

The big question in my mind here is if you fail at all while digging iron, and if you fail during the smelting process. If the success rate is 100% for both at 64.9 mining then I would say this is a valuable strategy.

Locking your Mining skill at 64.9 will prevent you from digging up all but iron. You wont fail at attempting colored ore, it simply wont be available to dig at all. Most if not all spots contain some iron, so essentially all spots will yield only iron to you.

The big question in my mind here is if you fail at all while digging iron, and if you fail during the smelting process. If the success rate is 100% for both at 64.9 mining then I would say this is a valuable strategy.

For smelting, couldn't you have someone else smelt it who has GM mining, instead?

I say, 'in case it's true', because I can't provide provenance and, even if it were mechanically accurate on OSI, what I am about to describe might not be (fully) implemented here.

I honestly don't remember if I learned this from an old Stratics article (which might have been incorrect, in itself), or from Raph Koster's blog, or from some other UO source discussing the 8x8 resource system; I've never done any research regarding the veracity of 'this', here at UOSA.

'This': harvesting-skill-use either succeeds and retrieves the resource, or fails and destroys the resource; if lumberjacking at the same tree, say, you could repeatedly fail to harvest any logs and eventually receive the sysmessage, "there is no wood here to harvest". So, an 8x8 square holding 50 ore would lose 1 ore every time the miner failed a mining skill check.

If 'this' is true a miner with 64.9-locked mining will destroy a lot of ore ... and will also fail to smelt a lot of ore ...

'This' commutes with my really-vague memories of starting-out 20 years ago on OSI: I'm sure I remember whacking the same spot over and over, failing, harvesting, failing, eventually failing a few times in succession and then being told that there was nothing to harvest. Of course, while I know that UOSA does employ "its own version" of 8x8, I don't know if this principle is incorporated.

A related issue: on OSI colored ore nodes did not possess fixed amounts of colored, versus non-colored, ore; there was only total (remaining) ore, and the miner's skill-check determined if colored ore was retrieved, or regular ore, or nothing at all; a colored ore node would simply have had a flag affixed, i.e. "colored ore: yes; agapite".

I'm suggesting it might be better to simply "avoid colored ore nodes", rather than lock a miner at 64.9.

I say, 'in case it's true', because I can't provide provenance and, even if it were mechanically accurate on OSI, what I am about to describe might not be (fully) implemented here.

I honestly don't remember if I learned this from an old Stratics article (which might have been incorrect, in itself), or from Raph Koster's blog, or from some other UO source discussing the 8x8 resource system; I've never done any research regarding the veracity of 'this', here at UOSA.

'This': harvesting-skill-use either succeeds and retrieves the resource, or fails and destroys the resource; if lumberjacking at the same tree, say, you could repeatedly fail to harvest any logs and eventually receive the sysmessage, "there is no wood here to harvest". So, an 8x8 square holding 50 ore would lose 1 ore every time the miner failed a mining skill check.

If 'this' is true a miner with 64.9-locked mining will destroy a lot of ore ... and will also fail to smelt a lot of ore ...

'This' commutes with my really-vague memories of starting-out 20 years ago on OSI: I'm sure I remember whacking the same spot over and over, failing, harvesting, failing, eventually failing a few times in succession and then being told that there was nothing to harvest. Of course, while I know that UOSA does employ "its own version" of 8x8, I don't know if this principle is incorporated.

A related issue: on OSI colored ore nodes did not possess fixed amounts of colored, versus non-colored, ore; there was only total (remaining) ore, and the miner's skill-check determined if colored ore was retrieved, or regular ore, or nothing at all; a colored ore node would simply have had a flag affixed, i.e. "colored ore: yes; agapite".

I'm suggesting it might be better to simply "avoid colored ore nodes", rather than lock a miner at 64.9.

SS

Your assessment seems sound, although I expect whether or not to lock skill early may come down more to what the miner is trying to achieve. If it's colored ore for use/sell, then the answer is obvious. If the intent, however, is to obtain metal to train a skill, i.e. blacksmithy, then locking skill with some ore loss may be preferable to spending time juggling multiple colored ores. It is easy to drag a pile of iron to a forge, juggling three additional piles becomes tedious. If colored ore comes from the same reserve as iron, and the miner simply drops the colored ore to avoid hassle, then mining colored ore is essentially the same as failing to mine iron.

I used both scenarios recently, one was my smith/miner mining to utilize the ore for training. Mining was GM'd. In the other scenario, my smith/miner was smithing, while on a separate client I had a miner with approximately 60 skill fetching iron. It seemed to me that the 60 skill miner acquired more useable iron with less effort than my GM miner. Note that the colored ore mined by my GM miner went unused and remains in my bank for future use.

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